Abstract
Behavioural public policy has received broad research attention, particularly in the domain of motivating pro-environmental behaviours. We investigate how far the efficacy of arguably one the most popular behavioural policy tools (green ‘default change’ nudges) depends on the associated cost. On the basis of a field study involving carbon offsets for over 30,000 flights booked by more than 11,000 airline customers, we show that green defaults have a large effect on voluntary climate action, even when several hundreds of Euros are at stake. The effect fully vanishes only as costs approach approximately €800.
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Data availability
Anonymized raw data are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/rd7sy) in accordance with a data protection agreement with the airline partner (for example, passenger IDs replaced with other unique IDs).
Code availability
Results reported in the main text and Supplementary Information can be reproduced using the statistical code published via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/rd7sy). All data have been analysed using the open-source software R.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the research assistance of A. Lange and V. Schneuwly. S.B. gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy through the ‘Energy, Economy, and Society’ programme (grant agreement no. SI/502093–01). A.O. gratefully acknowledges the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the excellence strategy (grant agreement no. EXC 2126/1-390838866) and the European Research Council (ERC) (grant agreement no. EU Horizon 2020 741409). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
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S.B., O.L., A.K., F.S., A.O. and A.W. conceptualized the study. S.B., F.S., A.O. and A.W. determined the methodology. S.B., F.S. and A.W. analysed the data. O.L. and A.K. curated the data. S.B., F.S. and A.W. wrote the initial draft. S.B., O.L., A.K., F.S., A.O. and A.W. commented on and revised the drafts. S.B., F.S. and A.W. visualized the results. S.B. and A.O. supervised O.L., A.K. and F.S. S.B. administrated the project. S.B. and A.O. acquired funding.
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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Manuel Grieder and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–10 and Tables 1–15 and references.
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Berger, S., Kilchenmann, A., Lenz, O. et al. Large but diminishing effects of climate action nudges under rising costs. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1381–1385 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01379-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01379-7
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